


The Name of the Game

by tinx_r



Category: Riptide - Fandom
Genre: First Time, M/M, Not-A-Songfic, Vietnam
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-11-02
Updated: 2010-11-02
Packaged: 2017-10-13 02:00:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,204
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/131560
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tinx_r/pseuds/tinx_r
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A song can you take you places you'd never imagine...</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Name of the Game

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


**Current music:**

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[Beach Blanket Bingo](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nk3ZN3dSeDk%22)  
  
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**Entry tags:**

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[deep water](http://riptide-asylum.livejournal.com/tag/deep%20water), [dw: pre-canon](http://riptide-asylum.livejournal.com/tag/dw%3A%20pre-canon)  
  
  
**Title:** The Name of the Game  
 **Rating:** R  
 **Summary:** A song can you take you places you'd never imagine...

Nick had first heard the jingle in the Prospect Theater. The summer of '65, sixteen years old and bluffing his football team he'd only taken the job because his mother had made him, it became the music of his sultry evenings, tinny and trite, but full of youth and hope.

He hummed it to himself through countless dates and beach parties. Even as the nights grew colder and the Prospect Theater faded into a memory, the chill air of fall filled with pep rallies and jack o' lanterns.

When he heard it again in Vietnam it brought a grin to his face on a day he'd wondered if he'd ever smile again. They'd picked up half a unit of casualties, and as Nick had lifted the last of the men into the chopper, the soldier had grabbed his hand. The kid was so young, so scared, and Nick saw every fear in his own heart written in the soldier's eyes. It had taken the medic slapping his hand to make Nick let go, and even then, as he hauled the bird upwards through the falling fire, he couldn't think of anything except the hope and fear in those blue eyes.

They were stationed in Saigon, and he'd gone with some guys to a bar, drinking as hard as he could, trying to drown the fear along with the memory. The soldier was dead, maybe, by now, and even if he wasn't, Nick gave himself another week before his own luck ran out. He took another hit, feeling the tears coming, and then the doors of the music hall across the street flew open.

The music took him unawares, touched the boy he'd been. He laughed along with his unit, the soldier letting go, suddenly sure the blond kid he'd picked up would be okay. Thinking, for the first time, that maybe he would be too.

It turned out his instincts were right. Patched up, the rest of his unit shot down around him, the blond turned up in front of Pitbull Johnson a week later. Pitbull, with one of his taciturn glances, partnered him with Nick, even though the kid wasn't a pilot - even though Nick was getting a rep for fighting. When Nick opened his mouth, Pitbull just gave him a look.

"You got a problem, Ryder?"

Nick might have a rep for fighting, but he knew better than that. "No, sir. Where's he barracked?"

"With you, asshole." Pitbull spat, and saluted. "See you both at 2300. We're moving out tonight. Ryder, you can fly a jeep this week, that clear?"

Nick saluted. There was really nothing else to do. "Sir." Next to him, the blond saluted smartly.

Cody couldn't fly a chopper, but he could drive. Nick would give him that. Nick had never liked patrol on ground level, but with Cody behind the wheel he felt safer than he ever had before - safer than he figured he had any right to feel in the middle of a war. Cody had a cheeky grin, a grin that reminded Nick of football practice and surfing and the leading men in the movies playing at the Prospect Theater. When Cody grinned, Nick remembered the world before the war, and dared to hope that one day, he'd see it again.

Back in the air, Nick found a touch with a chopper he'd never had before. With Cody beside him, half-grim, half-cocky, rifle slung rakishly over his arm as he spotted the wide yellow sky, Nick found he could get any bird any place. He'd always been a good pilot, but he'd always been prepared to die if it came to it. Cody... there was no way that Nick was prepared to let Cody die. And if that meant flying backwards through hellfire in a snowstorm, Nick was the man to do it.

Nick came out of the field with a rep as a guy you wanted on your side and a raft of legends about the choppers he'd brought home that no-one could have landed without the help of the devil himself. Nick just shrugged and told 'em even the devil got out of the way of crazies, then bumped Cody's shoulder with his own.

Cody's grin never varied, that same sweet light that made Nick forget he'd ever known war. "Never seen a devil crazy enough to keep up," he'd say, and they'd down another beer. Always with their men, at the edge of the party but not the life of it. Together, always together. They were always down for a good time: but first, they had each others' backs.

Stationed in the city was worse in a lot of ways than the terrors of the jungle. It wasn't safe - they were still at war, this was just a classier battle with less dust and blood and just as much death and evil. Nick hated it worst; there was no enemy to get ahold of, nothing to shoot, just the endless round of bureaucracy and red tape. Cody coped better, his eyes quiet and still where Nick's were restless and angry.

Late at night, when Nick couldn't sleep for the fear, the need to be fighting someone, it was Cody who reached out in the dark. Cody's hand, cool between his shoulderblades, that steadied his racing heart. Cody's whisper, soft and close, that banished the enemy and gave Nick what little peace there was to find in the South East Asian night.

But it was Nick's restless watchful eyes that saved their lives. Cody didn't see the movement, and if he had, he might've put it down to nothing, but there was something in the way the man was running - Nick had Cody's shoulders and had thrown them both flat into the rotten vegetables at the bottom of the hill before he could have even named what he'd seen.

Cody stared at him, not moving, trusting - always trusting - and Nick sobbed out a breath. Nothing happened, but Cody didn't move, waiting, watching, gripping Nick's arms when Nick would have got up.

With a sound like the gates of hell, the street erupted around them. Shrieks and roars echoed with the howls of livestock and the fiery boom of explosives. Nick started to shout, to move, and Cody had him tight, pinning him down, his body holding Nick hard against the cold squidge of cabbage leaves and Nick struggled to breathe, to think. He got a hand free, groping, and finally found Cody's fingers.

Cody gripped back, and they didn't move until the noise had died away to feeble shouts and running feet.

The bombs happened too often for everyone's liking. There were uniformed troops at the top of the hill, running about, too late to stop or save or arrest. The bombers were dead or gone or both, maybe children, maybe women. Maybe young men who preferred to make war on civilians rather than die in the jungle. It turned Nick's gut to bile and he swung away, puking his guts out to join the filth in the bottom of the street.

Cody picked him up, strength at just the right moment, turning Nick away from the swarming soldiers, the carnage. They were on duty, but Nick knew without needing to be told that Cody couldn't go up there right now, any more than he could himself. Despite the army's best efforts, they were still human.

Nick shot a glance at Cody and managed a crooked grin. "That there trick just gives and gives, huh?"

"Any time you wanna get up close and personal with a cabbage, buddy, I'm your man." Cody reached out and flicked a hunk of greenery off Nick's ear.

They walked the distance to the tiny bar where they spent their take-home pay, shoulders close together, hips bumping every step. There were things that didn't need words, they just needed a voice, and for Nick, the only voice he ever wanted was Cody's.

A jug of beer each and two cheerful hookers turned away, and Nick was starting to feel as close to good as it got over here. He leaned on the bamboo table, elbow pressed against Cody's, feeling every breath, every sip of beer. Every heartbeat. The cheerful American jukebox segued from Don McLean's new hit American Pie to something cheerful and boppy and oldfashioned, and two beats in, Nick found himself humming.

"You like this song?" Cody grinned and raised his beer. "Beach Blanket Bingo. Never did find a girl who was keen to give that a try."

Nick stared at Cody. Shadows from the dirty five-fingered palm by the wall lay over the dim afternoon light on his face, turning his golden hair caramel, his eyes into shadows. Suddenly it was important, essential, for Nick to see past the shadows and he leaned forward, reaching out shakily, hardly able to breathe.

Cody caught him. He always caught him.

Wrists in Cody's strong grasp, Nick stared into his best friend's clear blue eyes, the shadows long forgotten. He saw realization, the fear, the _thrill_ as Cody looked inside him, felt the moment when Cody saw his need and knew it for what it was.

Nick couldn't breathe. _Cody_.

Cody looked at Nick again, his own eyes blazing, the calm stillness forgotten. He was hungry, angry, desperate - Nick could taste it. He gaped at Cody for an instant then turned to the nearest of the scrawny hookers leaning on the bar.

"Sweetheart, hey. You wanna talk some?"

"Nick..." Cody breathed, disappointment and confusion and plain raw fear in his voice.

Nick tapped him lightly under the table and gently freed one hand from Cody's grasp. "Sweetheart!" He waved at the hooker again.

Cody relaxed slightly, returning Nick's nudge and pressing his knee in close to Nick's. The hooker turned and with a practiced sway teetered over on shoes three sizes too large.

"Good time? Two boys, I got deal?" She waggled her eyebrows suggestively and leaned in close. "You like, honey?"

Nick swallowed hard and glanced at Cody. "We like," he agreed with a weak smile. "Sweetheart, you have a room?"

"Great room. Verr-ry good room. Bed and ever'thing." She smiled widely and shimmied. "I do you special. Two boys, two hours."

It was a very good room, Nick agreed, even though the special doubled in price when the lady in question realized they wanted the room without her in it. Nick didn't care: he'd have paid ten times that for the squalid peace of the shanty room, the dirty afternoon sunlight winking between the poorly-fitting wall-boards.

Cody under his hands was vibrant and real, strong in his arms, pulling and fighting and _holding_. Nick hung on, trying to experience everything at once, the heat, the pleasure, the absolute rightness of being one with Cody. The idea of ever letting him go again was impossible.

They were still at last, impossibly hot in the still, close air. Pressed tight together, regardless of the heat, staring into each others' eyes. Cody laid a hand along Nick's jaw, stroking softly, and Nick nearly cried at the wonder, the hope, that he saw in Cody's eyes.

Then Cody smiled, and Nick forgot everything he'd ever known that wasn't the man beside him. He was Cody's, now and always; and that was all that mattered.

Nick didn't figure he'd ever heard the song again after 1974, not until the Boz talked them into watching _Good Morning Vietnam_ the week it came out on VHS. He was already shaken, the movie far too real and far too fake all at once, jabbing the raw places with clumsy fingers. When the tune came on, eerie and wrong, Nick grabbed for Cody first, then cut and ran.

He made it halfway down the pier before he heaved, retching popcorn and the last of dinner into the harbor, clinging to the rail and shaking. Cody caught up with him before his head stopped spinning, strength against his back, a gentle hand on his ribcage. No words, because there weren't any.

"Better get back," Nick said hoarsely, pulling away, but Cody held on, shaking his head.

"It's not my kind of movie, Nick." Gently, he piloted Nick away from the rail, away from the Riptide, and Nick followed, numb but obedient.

Down on the sand, the clean ocean breeze and the clash of the incoming tide slowly chased the past back where it belonged. Sitting on a driftwood log, down at Cody's favorite spot, Nick slowly started to feel again. Slowly started to breathe.

The moonshadows on Cody's face turned his hair caramel, hid his eyes. Nick quivered inside at the familiar magic - he didn't need to see Cody's eyes anymore to know what his partner was thinking - and reached for Cody blindly.

The years had only made it sweeter, stronger. They had no secrets left anymore, nothing to come between them. Nothing to fear. In Cody's arms, Nick was whole, and anywhere else, he didn't figure it mattered.

 _  
**"The Name of the Game" (Deep Water, 1972)**   
_


End file.
